Producing CALDB Data Files

To produce your own calibration files in a CALDB-type format

Just follow these steps:

If your calibration data file is not in FITS format,
convert the to FITS format. This may be the trickiest step since you'll
probably have to access or write software to read your file format and to
generate the FITS formatted output. The utility fcreate (part of the FTOOLS software package) allows you to create FITS files based on ASCII templates, which may be helpful. You'll need to decide how to arrange
your information within the FITS file (separate extensions, tables vs.
images, etc.)

the CALDB is CASE-InSenSItiVe. You can use upper-case, lower-case, or mixed case strings for values of the TELESCOP, INSTRUME, DETNAM, etc keywords. However, these values will be converted to upper-case when indexed by the CALDB software.

Verify your data file to make sure it's a valid FITS file
(one way is to use the fverify routine available in the FTOOLS
software package)

Verify the checksum of your data to ensure that the CHECKSUM and
DATASUM keywords as used are valid. Use of the CHECKSUM and DATASUM
keywords are highly recommended to ensure data integrity. The FTOOLS
utility fchecksum will verify, update and/or create the CHECKSUM & DATASUM
keyword values.

run the FTOOL udcif. UDCIF will require
the calibration filename, the name (and location) of
the index file, and the "quality value" of dataset being entered (a quality
value of 0 means 'good' quality).

Run the FTOOL caldbflag
to flag the new calibration file as "LOCAL" in the CAL_ORIGIN
column of the caldb.indxfile).

Perform an fdump
on the caldb.indx to check the files have been indexed correctly